What's tech got to do with it? We went to SXSW to talk about how volunteer computing can help save the planet.

20 Apr 2018

SummaryWorld Community was invited to give two presentations on the power of crowdsourced computing power at SXSW 2018 in Austin, Texas. See the full presentations, as well as a short video with excerpts from both, in this article.

We were thrilled to be invited to give two presentations in the Code and Programming track at SXSW 2018. You can see both presentations in full, as well as a few excerpts in the first video below.

In this short video, two scientists talk about the crucial issues they're researching: climate change and clean energy. World Community Grid project manager Juan Hindo and software developer Jonathan Armstrong explain the important role of volunteers in accelerating research.

Last year, IBM issued a call for proposals to climate change and environmental researchers, offering them not only World Community Grid supercomputing power, but also data from The Weather Company and storage on IBM Cloud Object Storage. In this video, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist Lloyd Treinish joins Juan and Jonathan to talk about the most pressing issues in climate change, the extent of the climate change science community's technical needs, and the opportunity for the tech community to help.

Dr. Alan Aspuru-Guzik was the lead researcher for the Clean Energy Project, which uncovered a large number of potential new and improved solar cells. In this presentation, Alan gave an overview of the work so far, and talked about his plans for further extending his collaboration with World Community Grid and other organizations.